Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games released a couple of interesting videos about its growing space simulator.
The first video is part of the "Journey to 4.0" series that is dedicated to concepts coming down the line. It focuses on the three branches of the upcoming engineering gameplay that is a very relevant part of the multi-crew idea behind running Star Citizen's biggest ships.
It's worth mentioning that this gameplay loop still doesn't have proper visuals, so the developers took some funny liberties to visualize some of its concepts. So no, most likely you won't be propelled into space by exploding toilets if your engineer doesn't do a good job. That being said, it's still pretty funny.
Interestingly, while no dates were provided, we hear that this might "come sooner than we think." No. Not the exploding toilets, albeit I maintain that they would be perfectly fitting to the sometimes wacky nature of this hyper-sandbox game.
You can watch it below.
We also get a rather relaxed but extensive video focusing on Cloud Imperium Games' partner developer Turbulent followed by a discussion with members of the Squadron 42 (Star Citizen's single-player portion).
In the meanwhile, Star Citizen's growing crowdfunding campaign continues to progress and the game has just hit $554 million ($554,225,353 at the moment of this writing) pledged from backers.
The number of registered users has also recently passed 4.4 million and it's now at 4,435,512, albeit not all of them are paying since many register accounts to access the popular free fly events that provide a chance to test the game without pledging any money. According to the latest information that creative director Chris Roberts himself shared in October 2022, 1.7 million players are actually paying customers. Of course, that number is a few months old, so it could be higher now.
Star Citizen recently ended its best year ever in terms of crowdfunding, with a whopping $113 million pledged in 2022, marking a 31% increase over 2021. The tally has been consistently increasing year-on-year since 2018.
The game just received a new update numbered Alpha 3.18, the largest since 3.0 in 2017.
Full disclosure: the author of this post has backed Star Citizen all the way back when its crowdfunding was first launched in September 2012.
